Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

I’m always a sucker for an adventure book – one that takes you somewhere else, where you can sit in your reading chair and climb mountains or live in a foreign land.  I love those.  When I read the jacket synopses of Once Upon a River, I thought that was what I was in store for.  In fact, what I got was a strange coming of age story about tragedy, revenge, and recovery.

Margo Crane is a 16 year old who lives with her dad and all of her extended family on the Stark River of Michigan.  On a fateful Thanksgiving, she endures a terrible family tragedy which leaves her guilty and on the run.  With sharpshooter Annie Oakley as her hero, Margo spends the next several years traveling the river, shooting and hunting for her food, looking for her absent mother and shacking up with men along the way.  Margo ends up on the Kalamazoo River with her only friend, an old man in the last days of life, his dog and his best friend Fishbone.  Here she tries to figure out how to live the life she wants to live in a way that she can understand. 

Margo is an interesting character.  She is bold and smart and resourceful.  She is likened to a River Nymph and has the otherworldly qualities you might expect from such a creature.  However, she’s still a kid (something the author forgets on occasion) and we sometimes see her making choices that help us remember.  Her journey from innocence to adulthood is filled with dastardly men and an unhealthy relationship with her shotgun.  We learn a lot about skinning game and living off the land.  What we don’t learn is a lot about the river she lives on. While Margo certainly knows how to survive in nature, I didn’t get a clear picture of the landscape in which she is to survive.  Truly I had a hard time placing her at all.  With the redneck cousins, the shacks on the river and the trapping and hunting, I kept envisioning the bayous of the American south, not the cold rivers of Michigan. 

Margo herself is placed in a lot of gritty adult situations.  At the beginning, like any teenager, she sees herself as the victim of her circumstances – everyone does things to her.  Slowly she begins to understand that her actions have consequences and that she can design her life as she wants to and in a way she understands.  I think these lessons are some that many adults don’t ever learn.  While the author tries to teach us, I’m not sure Margo is old enough to have learned the lessons so well at such a young age.  Her tenacity and her resourcefulness give us a heroine with nerves of steel and an ability to find herself in situations well over her head.  We see her puzzle out the value of revenge, the burden of guilt and the grace of recovery. 

A friend recommended this book to me with the caveat “I couldn’t think of anyone else to recommend this to, you like weird books, so I thought you might like this one.” Bonnie Jo Campbell writes a well plotted book with an interesting cast of characters, and a sharp and strong female lead but somehow we’re left sitting in our reading chair, not entirely sure what we just read.